We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
91
One Up for Romance
Out of the crowds of good-looking but matterof-fact young men now swarming over the screen in intensely realistic films, there rises a youth named Mervin Williams who flies the banner of romance, and aspires to poetic roles.
By Margaret Reid
THE newest romantic hero to appear on the screen horizon is Mervin Williams. Coming at a time when the public is being plied with wise-cracking college heroes and the dramatic experiences of hundred-percent business men, this youthful player's flair for more picturesque drama will be either a great obstacle to him or an equally great asset — according to the vagrant fancy of the public.
Mervin, until a few months ago, was the featured player of the Pasadena Community Theater, which is the home of a particularly admirable little-theater group. For six years Mervin studied with them, growing up with the theater itself.
Pictures he has found difficult. The studios overawe him, the efficiencv is terrifying.
With three other young crusaders he recently made a picture on a shoe string. With five thousand dollars they produced a romantic comedy with interesting camera angles and novel treatment, tempered sufficiently with what is known as sure fire to make it salable, since a picture made for five thousand dollars must be sold. Despite its distinctly jazzy title, "Razz-Berried Treasure," the production is an experiment in which Hollywood is evincing interest.
Right, Mervin offers a travesty of Doug Fairbanks in "The Black Pirate" and, below, of John Barrvmore in "The Sea Beast."
Mervin. Williams, though only twenty-one, has already, with three other young idealists, produced a romantic comedy, himself playing the leading role.
Featured in it are some bits of travesty offered by Mervin. who plays the leading role. This is the first travesty seen on the screen in some time. In one brief sequence he appears as John Barrymore in "The Sea Beast,'' in another as Fairbanks in "The Black Pirate." These burlesques are so neatly done that the victims themselves could only approve.
Mervin Williams would like to do the poetic on the screen as he thinks it should be done. "It should always." he believes, "have virility. Why do people confuse poetic with anaemic? The expression of the spiritual, on the screen or stage, should be fundamentally virile to have any meaning."
In moments of dreaming, he conjures up an Elysian day when he may do "Peleas and Melisande" with Lillian Gish.
He is very young, this Mervin Williams — just twenty-one. with the eager enthusiasm of that age but with the poise of thirty. With, also, keen intelligence and wit. To say nothing of chiseled features designed for the camera's benefit. Hollywood doesn't often commit itself to the extent of rash prophecies. But in the case of this boy the sages stroke their beards and predict "a future."
Hollywood as a whole is keeping an expectant eye on him. You might do the same, and see what happens.